Indonesian wild fire now at highest record

Indonesian fire season progression

Last update: October 27, 2015

Based on the Satellite based fire detection active fire data from http://www.globalfiredata.org/, the total number of active fire recorded has breaked the record of 100,000. It is now higher than the 2006 level, and rapidly approaching the 120,000 level. On 27 Octocber 2015, it has detected 117,018 fire hot spot.

Above the greenhouse gas emissions from Indonesian fires are plotted according to GFED for 1997-2014 with estimates for 2015 based on active fires. These are converted to emissions based on a relation between the two, established using data from previous years, see the figure and text below for more information. The numbers on the right indicate fossil fuel CO2 emissions for various countries for 2013 derived from the EDGAR database.

The CO2 emission from the 2015 Indonesia fire is estimated more than 1.5 Billion tons CO2. The level is higher than Germany and Japan yearly fossil fuel CO2 emission in 2013.

In general, fire CO2 emissions are compensated for by regrowing vegetation after a fire and should not be compared to fossil fuel emissions, but that is not the case when forests are burned to make way for other land uses or when peat is burned. That is exactly what happens with the vast majority of the fires in Indonesia and these fires are thus a net source of CO2 as well as other greenhouse gases (GFED).